As a startup company that developed a Fig orchestration framework for firing up and managing Docker containers alongside a cloud service based on Docker, Scott Johnston, senior vice president of product at Docker, says the acquisition of Orchard is a natural extension of Docker’s effort to create an implementation of a container that runs on multiple distributions of Linux.

Of course, the next big challenge facing IT organizations will be trying to manage containers alongside virtual machines. In an ideal setting, the same management console would be able to invoke orchestration frameworks for managing both.

Naturally, it will be a little while longer before most IT organizations encounter that problem. But as enthusiasm for containers continues to grow in the Linux community, it’s only a matter of time before that issue begins to manifest.